ROOM NEXT DOOR, THE
(director/writer: Pedro Almodovar; screenwriter: based on the novel What Are You Going Through by Sigrid Nunez; cinematographer: Eduard Grau; editor: Teresa Font; music: Alberto Iglesias; cast: Julianne Moore (Ingrid), Tilda Swinton (Martha), John Turturro (Damian Cunningham), Alessandro Nivola (Flannery, a cop); Runtime: 110; MPAA Rating: NR; producer: Augustin Almodovar; Sony Picture Classics; 2024-Spain/USA-in English)
“The performances by Swinton and Moore are captivating.”
Reviewed by Dennis Schwartz
The 74-year-old Spanish auteur Pedro Almodovar (“Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!”/”Woman on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown”) directs his first English film. It’s adapted from the 2020 American novel What Are You Going Through by Sigrid Nunez. The cathartic film is about a cancer patient wanting to end her life with a pill.
It won the Golden Lion as the best film at the 81st Venice International Film.
The Manhattan-based noted author Ingrid (Julianne Moore) in her latest book tells about facing death. At a book signing she’s informed by a mutual friend that her old friend and fellow magazine war correspondent during the Vietnam War, Martha (Tilda Swinton), who she hasn’t seen for years, is hospitalized with cervical cancer. She thereby becomes a regular visitor.
Depressed because her experimental treatment is not working, Martha’s purchased online from the dark web a euthanasia pill and wishes to take her life in her rented luxury country home in New York’s upstate Woodstock, and asks Ingrid to be with her when she commits suicide (making sure Ingrid doesn’t get in any legal trouble).
Almodovar avoids keeping things terribly morbid, as he includes his brand of frothy comedy in his set-pieces. Keeping the suicide watch in touch with the beauty of the surrounding woods of their house and watching a Buston Keaton silent on video, he warmly shows us you can be in favor of life by supporting assistant-suicide.
John Turturro as Damian Cunningham, pops up delivering a lecture at Bard. He’s an activist climatologist, a former lover of both women, who rebukes his former liberalism for his new activistism. Woke liberalism gets lambasted for being out of touch with the virtues of traditional liberalism.
The women on the other hand are treated with deference and extolled for overcoming their fear of death to act on their own belief system despite the legal system being against them.
The performances by Swinton and Moore are captivating.
It played at the Venice Film Festival.
REVIEWED ON 9/13/2024 GRADE: A-
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